Accessibility

Accessibility Help

The St. Leger Homes' website has been designed to be both attractive and accessible to use, providing all users with access to the site, whatever their ability.

We've listed below many of the "best practise" techniques to make the St. Leger Homes a more usable and accessible website to use.

Usability

Viewing the website

The website has been designed to provide a site that is simple and user friendly. With a sensible a simple site navigation and meaningful page names, all information should be accessible with only a few clicks of the mouse. We've also tested the site in the following web-browsers:

MS IE 6.0
MSIE 7.0
Mozilla Firefox 1.0.7
Mozilla Firefox 1.5.x
Safari 1.x

Our website includes a:

A "Useful Features" top bar – Accessible from every page, this top bar gives users access to vital features of the website. These include:

Skip Navigation – allows visitors using screen readers to jump straight to the main page content
Text Only Version of the site – presented with high-contrast yellow text on a black background, the text only version of the website display the site content in an easy-to-read
View as PDF – allows the current page to be viewed and saved in PDF format.
Side Navigation. An easy to use menu system that expands to display any sub-pages of the current page. When a page is selected, it moved to the top of the menu.
Main content area – the main part of the website where you can read the information you have selected
Footer on all pages containing address and contact information on all pages. The footer also includes a feedback email address that encourages users to comment on the site.

Accessibility features

We have designed all our templates to help make the website accessible to all users including disabled users.

W3C Compliance

The St. Leger website has been coded in keeping with the guidelines issued by W3C/WAI.

Speech Enabled

The website is also 'speech-enabled', using a system called Browsealoud. By installing a simple free download onto your computer, which you can download using the link on this page, you have the text on our web pages and some documents read out loud. This can be a huge help to those with visual impairment, dyslexia, literacy difficulties or those for whom English is a second language.

Once you have made the initial download it will allow you to easily access a number of other local and national government websites, as well as interenet search engines such as Google and Yahoo.

Once the software has been downloaded to your PC, look for the browsealoud icon in your 'system tray' (which is usually at the bottom right-hand corner of the screen). Right click on the icon and choose 'open browsealoud settings' from the menu. You can now customise the settings, such as male or female voice, changing the speed, pitch and volume of the reader.

Download the Browsealoud software

Text only

As well as making all graphic templates accessible, we have also included a text only option. This will allow users to view the website in high contrast and without graphics and pictures.

Tab indexing

We have included tab indexing on our website which makes tabbing through our site easier. It also helps users who access the website using only a keyboard.

This is the tab order of our website

Assistive Technology

Disabled users can use assistive technology to help them use our website. We have tested our website with both text-only browsers and screen magnifiers.

Please let us know if you have any problems using these tools or would like to recommend ways we can improve access to our website. We will do our best to make improvements.

Visual design

To help you view our website we have:

Used colours with a maximum contrast between the background and foreground
Given all meaningful images and graphics an Alt-text name which describes what you would be looking at if the image was displayed
Chosen the standard blue colour for all active hyperlinks
Used style sheets so you can change the size of the text using your browsers text size controls: